


Dissenting Stare

by conceptstage



Series: Single Chapter Critical Role [73]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 09:33:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17680916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptstage/pseuds/conceptstage
Summary: Sometimes Beau reminds Caleb of the people that Trent would bring in for him to interrogate and execute. It both scares and amuses him.





	Dissenting Stare

Sometimes he saw it in her eyes.

She had a proclivity for dissent that he could respect, but she didn’t rebel for the sake of rebelling. He could see the questions in her stare, the distrust of authority, the need to be her own person. 

Sometimes he saw it in the way she moved. 

Fast, sharp movements like she didn’t want to give someone the opportunity to stop her. He could see determination in the way she tilted her head when she had a plan, the way that sometimes her feet would move before her upper half caught up with her instincts, the way her shoulders bunched up around her neck like a cat when she was feeling threatened.

Sometimes he saw it the way she spoke. 

She had this way of provoking people with her words, with her attitude, that both amazed him when it was directed at others and infuriated him when she turned it on him. The casual gruffness of her voice like she had all the time in the world, the way she laughed mirthlessly like nothing you could say would bother her, the way she spoke in circles to make you think she knew more than you did when really she was stumbling through the dark hoping to trip over some treasure.

He had seen all of this a hundred times in a hundred different people, some more than others. Some people had the dissent without the conviction, some the conviction without the cleverness, some were brilliant with nowhere to go. 

And they all ended up in his chair.

The look in her eyes, the tone in her voice, the twitch in her movement, he recognized all of that and knew that if she had been around when he was at the academy she would have eventually ended up in his interrogation room. At that point he was so brainwashed, so sure that what he was doing was right, he would have overlooked all the good in her and only focused on the rebellion.

And watching Beau needle the poor bartender into telling her everything he knew about the people they were chasing made him realize something.

Trent would have absolutely hated her.

He hated most people, saw them as beneath him, but he put on a mask when he was dealing them. A mask of friendliness and compassion, smiling even as he was twisting them to their breaking point. He thought of him now, and for the first time he wasn’t scared. He imagined Beau glaring him down, her posture terrible as usual, her voice low and casual like she had nowhere else in the world to be, like being tied to his chair was her idea. She was the one restrained but she was also the one asking the questions. Trent wouldn’t know what to do with someone like her. He could almost see Trent’s stoic facade start to unravel, the anger and hatred that was always boiling under his kind words start to rise to the surface, his practiced smile twitch into a sneer. Part of him wanted to see it. The rest of him knew that there was no way that she was going to survive such an encounter. Even Beau couldn’t out run the entire Cerberus Assembly on her own. 

But still, the imagery was a pleasant one. If anyone could annoy the faux-kindness out of Trent Ikithon is was Beauregard.

“What the fuck are you smiling about?” she asked, sliding into the chair across from him, plucking a fry off of Jester’s plate beside her. 

“Am I smiling?” he asked, consciously schooling his face back to a neutral expression.

“You were. Not that I’m complaining, but it’s weird as shit.”

Nott was giving him a curious look as well but he just shook his head. “No, no. I just enjoy watching you work.”

“What, the bartender? I was just asking questions.”

“Is that why he’s crying?”

“He-what?” she turned around and, sure enough, the half orc behind the bar had tears rolling down his face. “Ah, shit. Did I do something bad? Do I have to go apologize? Goddamnit, I hate apologizing.” But she got up and strut back over to him. He flinched when she got near but relaxed marginally as she spoke. 

“Beau’s weird,” Nott said. “How do you accidentally make someone cry like that?”

“Ja,” he agreed. “She’s an odd one. But she’s a good egg.”


End file.
